Moonies mourn ‘messiah’ Rev Sun Myung Moon

The Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, has declared 13 days of mourning after the death of its founder and self-proclaimed messiah the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in South Korea.

Unification Church founder Rev Sun Myung Moon speaks during a rally in New York in 2005 (Picture: AP)

Rev Moon died aged 92 at a hospital his church owned near his home in Gapyeong, north-east of Seoul, two weeks after he was admitted there with pneumonia.

He was born in what is now North Korea in 1920 and 16 years later he said Jesus Christ called upon him to complete his unfinished work.

His religious movement, created in 1954 in Seoul following the Korean War, achieved global notoriety in the 1970s following mass weddings of couples who had often not previously met and were mainly from different countries.

In the US the church faced allegations of brainwashing and conning followers out of money, and in the 1980s Rev Moon served 13 months in a federal prison for tax evasion.

A mass wedding of couples from around the world arranged by the Rev Sun Myung Moon in Asan, south of Seoul (Picture: AP)

However, despite that, he built up a business empire including the Washington Times newspaper, the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, Bridgeport University in Connecticut and a ski resort and football team in South Korea, as well as befriending Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr.

In 1991 he met North Korea’s founder and eternal leader Kim Il-sung in Hamhung, where Rev Moon said he received assurances over the reclusive Stalinist state’s nuclear programme.

In recent years he increasingly handed over day-to-day running of his church and business interests to his 14 children, but still conducted a mass wedding for 2,500 people in March of this year.

The church claims it has millions of members, but critics say the number is closer to 100,000.